Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday launched a major third-party investigation that discovered that intercourse abuse survivors had been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embody stunning new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when prime leaders had been secretly holding a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over learn how to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the instances referred to within the report had been thought-about exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization referred to as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with protecting the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to gentle in recent times that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only one month after he accomplished his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the details around lots of the tales they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's via and thru about power. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any manner reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 centered on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders because it will go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while holding it a secret to avoid the potential for getting sued. The report additionally consists of private emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “immediate motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to stay on the identical path all these years,” mentioned Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went towards the advice of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider the Executive Committee was not doing the “will of the messengers,” or following the lead of lay leaders who had already voted in favor of doing so. It also led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings in a number of states, has lengthy advocated a churchwide database and was met with hostility. The report states that when she met with SBC leaders in 2007, a member of the Government Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored arduous to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their very own choice to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a statement.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different church buildings. In contrast to the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical structure.

In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local churches” but that they would try to make use of their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not immediately return a request for remark.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist process drive on the difficulty and said that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt exterior experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous option to how Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union when he detailed Joseph Stalin’s crimes in a speech in 1956.

“The depths of wickedness and inhumanity in this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will take into account changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years combating for reform.